Most businesses have the ability to serve customers in real time over multiple channels. However, the experience is often far from ideal, especially over the phone. That problem is also reflected in how companies are able to collect data in their contact center, putting them further behind when it comes to customer insights both in that channel and overall.
Despite that, getting access to the data in their contact center is a priority for many leaders. A recent study by CCW Digital found that elevating data and knowledge was a top contact center priority for 45% of the study’s respondents. So how do you accomplish that goal?
At our recent webinar, Harness Customer Insights With AI In Your Contact Center, Director of Solution Experience, Carol Righi, moderated a discussion between Director of AI-Enabled Customer Service Solutions, Tom Thelen, and Director of Decision Science, Brandon Fischer where they talked about the possibilities that AI in your contact center opens for data capture - and what it can mean for the business as a whole. Here are some of the major takeaways.
Takeaway #1: AI Allows Modern Contact Centers to Capture the Data They Were Missing
As mentioned above, the traditional contact center is the main area where businesses struggle to capture data. While you can see what menu option someone selected, how long they were on the line, and the time they were on hold, the actual conversation a caller has with live agents is only sometimes recorded, and it’s rarely mined for data.
Utilizing AI-powered intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) in your contact center helps overcome those issues to capture much more data. While you can still measure the aforementioned basics that contact center leaders currently analyze, you can also track and examine things like:
- The exact wording your customers use
- How effective your IVA is at serving your customers with its current capabilities
- The best use cases your IVA should help with
- How conversations progress
- The caller’s feelings with sentiment analysis
- And more!
Takeaway #2: Your Data Can Have An Immediate Impact On How You Serve Your Customers
The large quantity of now-available data can change the way you serve your customers now and in the future. Utilizing sentiment analysis, you can immediately know whether the customer is upset, neutral, or positive, meaning the live agent can serve the customer based on their mood sensed by the IVA. Agents can then receive real-time feedback and suggestions based on what the customer is saying, aiding them to provide material or answers that will help the customers.
In the long term, these insights will provide patterns that can shape how you serve customers. For example, you may find that phrases are confusing or unhelpful, while others are more successful. You may have a large volume of calls about certain topics that your customers could solve through self-service channels. You could prepare answers for commonly recurring themes that may not be appropriate for self service. All of that should go to increasing your customer satisfaction while also decreasing the time to service, and thus becoming more cost efficient.
Takeaway #3: Customer Insights Should Reach Beyond the Contact Center
The data you can collect doesn’t just apply to your contact center or even customer service teams - the insights can change how most branches in your company work. For example, if people are calling in with common requests or complaints, you now have the data that you can take to your product team so that they can build a solution. Your marketing team can see what burning questions people have and create content to answer those questions or launch campaigns around popular topics. Your leadership team can see what people want from your business going forward.
The possibilities around the data are endless, and there’s not a part of a business that won’t benefit from it. By generating data in real-time and effectively bringing it all together to easily create reports, you can democratize access to your data in a way that will change how the entire company operates.
Watch the Webinar Replay
The full replay of Carol, Brandon, and Tom’s discussion is available to be viewed here. If you have any follow up questions or what you’d like to see in future webinars as part of this series, reach out! We’d love to hear from you.
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